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Pessoa's Chair

Stories to read while seated

We do not have any photographs of Fernando Pessoa's chair. In fact, the ones he always had were rentals and on the other hand he preferred to write standing up, leaning on a chest of drawers. And here we have it, in a vulgar room in Lisbon for which he pays four reales, in a tired and anonymous fourth floor where he lives questioning life, looking at the paper half full while a cheap cigarette is consumed on a blotting paper that makes an improvised ashtray.

It has recently stopped raining, standing in contemplation as the sunset sneaks through his window. The sky is slowly spaced, the last drops of accumulated water drain, the voices of the city sound again after the rain. He wishes life were an eternal being at the window in his rental room, in the intimate plausibility of the afternoon that runs along. From an old chair hangs an old coat for the morning vigils and on the floor, some worn slippers. Unlike Proust, who builds his warm interior with decorative objects from the family home, Pessoa only has rental furniture and a trunk as property. A melancholic inhabitant of the world, plural as the universe, his only property is a wooden box where, at the end of his life, he will accumulate a total of 27,543 handwritten or typed documents half ordered. Some unpublished texts written in papers, pamphlets or advertisements. Pessoa, reduces the house to a simple rental stopover shaken by the inalterable faith by the truth of the intimate, ethical and moral foundation of the bourgeois society, inhabitant of houses in property full of decorative grime.

"I wish life were an eternal being at the window in your rented room, in the plausible intimacy of the rushing afternoon."